1963 - Intro to Numerical Control - UW-Madison. Card punch, card reader, IBM 1620 (50K housed in two boxes each the size of your dining room table), no tape drives, all punch card output. Programmed in ForGo, a combination or Fortran and Gotran. Stand in line waiting for your job to run, run the cards through the card reader/printer and get *Program not accepted, line xx, line xx*, search for/correct the syntax error, re-punch the cards and run the whole process again.
Aahh, those were the days of *manly* computing. <g> Paul ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Francis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 11:17 PM Subject: Re: Home Computer Prediction From 1954 > William Robb mused: > > > > When I was in grade 8, which would have been 1970, I guess, the > > university installed a punch card terminal in my high school and all > > of a sudden, we had a computer science program. > > We did our little programs in basic, and the bundles of cards were > > sent off to be run through the computer. The next day, we got back > > tractor feed sheets of our work. > > Grade 9 we graduated to Fortran. > > Beat you by around five years; I got to use a Stantec Zebra on a > summer "Numerical Methods, Statistics & Computing" course. > > We didn't use no wimpy high-level languages - programming was in > autocode. It's amazing what you can do if nobody tells you that > it's supposed to be difficult :-) > > By 1970 I was using an Atlas and a 360/44, amongst other systems. > >
